They say the Chinese have a curse: may you live in interesting times. We Sri Lankans have definitely been cursed by the Chinese. This isn’t just a pun on the Port City: In the space of one year we, as a nation, have toppled a dictatorship, installed another one, cried out against Saudi Arabia and argued passionately the subject of ...
Everyone deserves a kind word for Christmas. Yes, even Sri Lankan politicos. So, in that spirit, we’d like to thank the following lovely souls: First the President. Merry Christmas, Mr President. I admit we had no idea who you were when we voted you in, but now we know each other better now. The good news is you’re still better ...
As the Star Wars premiere (December 26th) draws closer, more and more people ask me in puzzlement: “Why do you people like Star Wars so much?” Let me try and explain. (This may turn out to be an unsatisfactory explanation, so if you’ve got a better one, please comment). Sri Lanka, where I (and the majority of my readers) come from, ...
December is that time of the year when Christians ready the carols and the turkey and every other religious group, in time-honored tradition, does whatever they can to get invited to Christmas dinner. It’s usually a very happy time for everyone. Except this time someone seems to have thrown a monkey wrench in this jolly process: the Budget. Now that ...
The woman runs across the street. Tamil woman, beggar, your brain notes, and you bury that half-sensed disgust that rises, that uneasy unease that your temple-going, karma-fearing parents buried in you, years ago, one casual slur at a time. Dirty. Ugly. Beggar. You crush these thoughts with the half-formed specter of shame and watch as she recedes, a spot of color ...
The government of Sri Lanka has filed an appeal before the Riyadh Court in Saudi Arabia, on behalf of the Sri Lankan female domestic worker who was recently sentenced to be stoned to death after being found guilty of having a clandestine affair, the Foreign Employment Ministry said. The Ministry sources said the woman was married and having children in ...
In the wake of the Paris attack, Anonymous declared war on ISIS – #OpParis. Cue sinister Guy Fawkes mask promising the digital destruction of the Islamic State. Within 24 hours of ISIS calling them idiots, 5,500 ISIS-related Twitter accounts went down. Anonymous’s war on ISIS isn’t new. Some part of the collective has been hammering away at ISIS since Look up ...
There’s a video making the rounds of the Internet: a student protest at Yale. What they are protesting over is a bit complicated, but I’ll try to simplify: the Yale Intercultural Affairs Council sent out an email to everyone asking people not to wear Halloween costumes that might cause others to feel uncomfortable with regard to their race or ethnicity. ...
Like many others, I used to get up in the morning and check my RSS feeds. It didn’t matter where these feeds were. I always had them on call. Now I get up in the morning and check my Facebook. And there we are: the daily dose of politics, courtesy of NYT, Al-Jazeera, the Daily Mirror, Colombo Telegraph. The best ...
Before you read this, I want you to know that I have nothing against Spongebob. I love Spongebob. But man, I just realized that something is seriously off about this show. Okay, let’s start with something we know, and have no trouble accepting: Mr Krabs* is obsessed with money. Plutomania: an insatiable craving for money A lot of people say ...
Sri Lanka has a lot of protests, most of them conducted by local universities. We protest everything – governments, private education, scholarships, private education, private education… you get the picture. It seems that every other month there’s a couple of metal barricades and one of them water cannon machines rolling up the road. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of being ...
I, like most people, can’t multi-task for shit. I had a boss who could multi-task to the level where most of us thought he was insane, or had severe ADHD, or both. His work day, as far as I could see, was a furious flutter of phone calls and scribbled notes. Occasionally someone would drop by at his summons and ...
Ea spoke to Enlil saying “It was you, the Sage of the Gods. How could you bring about a flood without consideration?” – the epic of Gilgamesh I have a longstanding argument with a friend. The root cause of this is my attitude towards modern religion: I see religion as a delusion, and he, needless to say, is perfectly happy ...
I take the train to work. Like a lot of people, I wake up every morning and cast a bleary eye on the clock. There’s a train at 8:10. Good. I can reach the station at 7:50 AM, enough time to buy a ticket and realize that there’s nowhere for me to sit. All is normal. Sri Lankan trains are ...
I’ve had a fantastic time reading all that’s being written about Daham Sirisena. The Big D, as I now think of him, is a fantastic creature. I mean, who wouldn’t want a walking, talking, Facebook-ing PR nightmare for a son, am I right? Let’s assume for a moment that Maithripala Sirisena actually reads this blog (hah! Fat chance). Mr Sirisena, here’s a ...
You may have heard the story of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year old student who was arrested after bringing a home-made clock to school. While we were distracted by Ahmed and the Bomb, we missed the story of four guys from Green Cabin suspected of raping an autistic 23-year old. Let’s leave the US to its Islamophobia for a moment and ...
Indi Samarajiva recently wrote a post where he summed up the Sri Lankan Parliament: 225 MP’s, 90 of them in the Cabinet and holding some kind of portfolio – a bloated mess like no other. Needless to say, he titled the post “The New Cabinet. WTF.” I’m going to save the #mekadhaYahapalanaya rant for later. Instead, I tried thinking of this in perspective and ...
*This article of mine was originally published in the Sunday Leader a week ago. We know a lot about Kumar Sangakkara. For starters, we know the trivial thing – he’s almost 38, was born in Matale, and studied law before he broke into cricket. We know the important things – that Sangakkara is one of the influential cricketers in the ...
I was at Cinnamon’s Colomboscope the other week. To be honest, I liked it. Well, some of it. Most of it was a bunch of expats explaining Sri Lanka to foreigners. Generally, this includes well-meaning but meandering discussions on class conflict and a lot of thought on where Colombo is headed. This is ironic, because the people actually listening to this were definitely ...
People have always speculated why Instagram picked the 1:1 square format for its photos. I always believed it was a love letter to those old Polaroid and Kodak cameras – until I came across a Quora post by Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of Instagram: “We realized that if we were going to do photos, that we’d have to be ...
